The Third Bear (47 page)

In the end, the same sorcery that animated the woman's arm saved me. Over time, I healed. Over time, my new arm learned to live with me. I worried at first about gangrene in the place where the arm met my flesh, but I managed to prevent that. In the mornings, I woke with it as though it was a stranger I had brought home from a tavern. Eventually, it would wake me, stroking my forehead and touching my lips so delicately that I would groan my passion out into its palm.

It was the beginning of my life, in a way. A life in exile, but a life nonetheless, with a new partner. Lucius had helped me see to that.

So it was that when I went back to my parents' bungalow, I had a purpose and a plan.

They met me at the door and hugged me tight, for they hadn't heard from me in months and I was gaunt, pale.

I did not have to tell them everything. Or anything. I tried to hide the new arm from them, but it reached out for my mother as though gathering in a confidante. What did it say to her, woman to woman? What secrets did it spell into her hands? I had to look away, as though intruding on their conversation.

"What will you do?" my father asked.

As my mother held my new arm, he had run a fingertip across it, come away with a preserving dust.

I wanted to say that I had come to ask his advice, but the truth was I had only returned after I had settled my fate. In the days, the hours, before everything had become irrevocable, I hadn't sought their counsel. And he knew that, knew it in a way that filled his eyes with bewilderment, like a solution of cobalt chloride heated to its purest color.

"What will I do?" I knew, but I didn't know if I could tell them.

My father had his hand on my shoulder, as if needing support. My mother released the arm and it returned to me and tucked its hand into my pocket, taking refuge. She had not yet said a word to me.

I told them: "I've signed on as a ship's doctor. I've enough experience for that. My ship leaves for the southern islands in three days." The arm stirred, but only barely, like an eavesdropper that has overheard its own name.

Lucius' father owned the ship. It had been Lucius' last favor to me, freely and eagerly given. "As far from the city as possible," he said to me. "As far and for as long as possible."

My father looked crushed. My mother only smiled bravely and said, "Three days is not enough, but it will have to do. And you will write. And you will come back."

Yes, I would come back, but those three days - during which I would tell them everything, sometimes defiant, sometimes defeated and weeping - were my last three days with them.

Even in the shallow water near the bungalow, you learn to find shapes in shadow, if you look long enough. Staring into deep water as it speeds past and sprays white against the prow of a large ship, the wind lacerating your face, you see even more.

But I never saw her. I never saw her. I don't know why I expected to, and yet on all of the hundreds of voyages I took as a ship's doctor, I always looked. The sailors say mermaids live down there, with scaly hair and soft fingertips and cold, clammy kisses. I cared for none of that. I yearned to see her face by some strange necromancy, her blue eyes staring up at me through the ocean's darker blue.

Worse yet, whether on deck or in my cabin, whether during ferocious, stomach-churning storms or trying to save a man with a piece of broken-off deck board forced through his sternum, I wanted a dead woman to tell the story of her life. I wanted to know if she had been a sister, a niece, a granddaughter. I wanted to know if she'd liked cats or tormented them. Did she drink tea or coffee? Did she have an easy sense of humor? Was her laugh thin or full? How did she walk? What did she like to wear? So many questions came to me.

Because I had no idea of her personality, I imagined her, probably wrongly, as my double: embarrassed by her parents' eccentricities, a little amazed to find herself touched by life and led as though by the nose to this point of existence, this moment when I searched a hundred flavors of water for her smile.

It wasn't an academic point, and yet I experienced the sweet agony of living with a part of her every day. At first, I had little control over the arm, and it either flopped loosely at my side, uncooperative, or caused much trouble for me by behaving eccentrically. But, over time, we reached an accord. It was more skillful than I at stitching a wound or lancing a boil. The arm seemed to so enjoy the task that I wondered if the woman had been a thwarted healer or something similar - an artist of the domestic, who could sew or cook, or perform any arcane household task.

Sometimes, at night, it would crawl outside the counterpane, to the limits of its span, and lie in the cold air until the shivers woke me and forced me to reclaim it. Then I would besiege it with the warmth of my own flesh until it succumbed and became part of me again.

"Did you enjoy being a ship's doctor?" my guest would ask, if only to change the topic, and I would be grateful.

"It was boring and exhausting," I would say. "Sailors can injure themselves in a thousand different ways. There's only so much medicine you can carry on a ship."

"But did you enjoy it?"

"When it was busy, I would get pleasure from doing good and necessary work."

Keeping busy is important. My parents taught me that the utility of work was its own reward, but it also fills up your mind, gives you less time to think.

"Sounds like it wasn't half-bad," he'd say, like someone who didn't know what I was talking about.

Would I tell him the rest? Would I tell him about the times on the docks or at sea that I saw the pale white of drowning victims laid out in rows and immediately be back in the cadaver room? That some part of me yearned for that white dead flesh? That when I slept with women now it must be in the dark so that the soft yet muscular feel of them would not interfere with the image in my head of a certain smile, a certain woman. That I tried to fall in love with so many women, but could not, would not, not with her arm by my side.

In time, I gained notoriety for my skills. When docked, sailors from other ships would come to me for bandaging or physicking, giving themselves over to my mismatched hands. My masculinity had never seemed brutish to me, but laid against her delicate fingers, I could not help but find myself unsubtle. Or, at least, could not help but believe she would find them so. And, indeed, her hand never sought out the other hand, as if to avoid the very thought of its counterpart.

I settled into the life easily enough - every couple of years on a new ship with a new crew, headed somewhere ever more exotic. Soon, any thought of returning to the city of my birth grew distant and faintly absurd. Soon, I gained more knowledge of the capriciousness of sea than any but the most experienced seaman. I came to love the roll of the decks and the wind's severity. I loved nothing better than to reach some new place and discover new peoples, new animals, new cures to old ailments. I survived squalls, strict captains, incompetent crews, and boardings by pirates. I wrote long letters about my adventures to my parents, and sometimes their replies even caught up to me, giving me much pleasure. I also wrote to Lucius once or twice, but I never heard back from him and didn't expect to; nor could I know for sure my letters had made it into his hands, the vagaries of lettersby-ship being what they are.

In this way many years passed and I passed with them, growing weatherbeaten and bearded and no different from any other sailor. Except, of course, for her arm.

At a distant river port, in a land where the birds spoke like women and the men wore outlandishly bright tunics and skirts, a letter from my mother caught up with me. In it, she told me that my father had died after a long illness, an illness she had never mentioned in any of her other letters. The letter was a year old.

I felt an intense confusion. I could not understand how a man who in my memory I had said goodbye to just a few years before could now be dead. It took a while to understand I had been at sea for three decades. That somewhere in the back of my mind I had assumed my parents would live forever. I couldn't accept it. I couldn't even cry.

Six months later, slowly making my way back to my mother, another letter, this time from a friend of the family. My mother had died and been laid next to my father in the basement of the Preservation Guild.

It felt as if the second trauma had made me fully experience the first. All I could think of was my father, and the two of them working together in their bungalow.

I remember I stood on the end of a rickety quay in a backwater port reading the letter. Behind me the dismal wooden shanty town and above explosions of green-and-blue parrots. The sun was huge and red on the horizon, as if we were close to the edge of the world.

Her hand discarded the letter and reached over to caress my hand. I wept silently.

Five years later, I tired of life at sea - it was no place for the aging - and I returned home. The city was bigger and more crowded. The medical school carried on as it had for centuries. The mages' college had disappeared, the site razed and replaced with modern, classroom-filled buildings.

I stored my many trunks of possessions - full of rare tinctures and substances and oddities - at a room in a cheap inn and walked down to my parents' bungalow. It had been abandoned and boarded up. After two days, I found the current owner. He turned out to be a man who resembled the Stinker of my youth in the fatuousness of his smile, the foulness of his breath. This new Stinker didn't want to sell, but in the end I took the brass key, spotted with green age, from him and the bungalow was mine.